Category: Books

The story goes that Will Allen, son of South Carolina sharecroppers, never intended to become a farmer. In reality, Allen began growing and selling food at the age of 10. Today, he is leading a revolution to bring people back to the soil – urban, suburban, or rural soil – to grow their own food and discover the taste and connections that have been lost over the last 75 years of industrial agriculture.

While we want kids to know what nutritious foods look and taste like, and how to use and prepare them properly, the best place to start to give them the fundamentals is to teach them how to GROW their own food. Readers to Eaters’ new book, Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table, shows how a one man – a big, passionate, and determined man – started his own good food revolution when he took an empty city lot and turned it into an urban farm.

Exploring the cultural aspects of the development of agricultural ecosystems, the book also highlights how these topics can be applied to our understanding of contemporary agriculture, its long-term sustainability, the co-existence of agriculture and the environment, and the development of new crops and varieties.

Witty and irreverent, informative and provocative, Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge is the highly readable story of Gordon Edgar’s unlikely career as a cheesemonger at San Francisco’s worker-owned Rainbow Grocery Cooperative. Cheesemonger is the first book of its kind—a cheese memoir with attitude and information that will appeal to everyone from serious foodies to urban food activists.

Jo Robinson – not a next-door neighbor, but a neighbor nonetheless – lives on Vashon Island in the middle of Puget Sound. Until this year, Jo was known as a grass-fed beef expert for her research and collection of data about the nutritional value of beef raised on grass rather than grain. With the publication of Eating on the Wild Side, Jo turned her expertise to fruits and vegetables in order to “reclaim the nutrients and flavor we’ve lost” over millennia of natural selection and selective breeding.

From Portland’s most acclaimed and beloved baker comes this must-have baking guide, featuring recipes for world-class breads and pizzas and a variety of schedules suited for the home baker.

We’ve raided the shelves of the Kailing library to create a list of books that cover a wide range of topics and represent thinking separated by thousands of years. These books are centered on the relationship we have with the earth and each other, with our communities and surrounding ecosystems, with the plants and animals around us, and with the food we eat.